Latest news with #Guatemalan
16 hours ago
Guatemala court convicts 3 ex-paramilitaries of war crimes for rape and gives them 40-year sentences
GUATEMALA CITY -- More than four decades after Guatemalan soldiers and paramilitaries raped Indigenous women during their efforts to crush an insurgency in the country's 36-year civil war, a court on Friday convicted three men of crimes against humanity in the case and sentenced them to 40 years in prison. Thirty-six women from the Maya Achi Indigenous group came forward in 2011 to seek justice for the abuses they suffered between 1981 and 1985. They came from Rabinal, a small town about 55 miles (88 kms) north of the capital. Six of them testified against the three men convicted Friday. As the all female three judge panel prepared to announce the verdict, several elderly women huddled around a young woman who translated the judges' words from Spanish to Achi. Judge María Eugenia Castellanos, president of the tribunal, said the women had been brave to come on repeated occasions to testify. 'They are crimes of solitude that stigmatize the woman. It is not easy to speak of them,' she said. Judge Marling Mayela González Arrivillaga said there was no doubt about the women's testimony. In 2022, five other paramilitaries – men from the area trained by soldiers to help root out insurgents – were convicted of raping women and sentenced to 30 years in prison. No soldiers have been tried for the acts. Guatemala's civil war pitted the army and police against leftist rebels. It ended with the signing of peace accords in 1996. Of the 36 women who originally came forward, seven have died. The youngest was 19 when she was attacked. Among the women who testified at this trial, was Pedrina Ixpatá. She is 63 now, but was 21 when she said she was assaulted. Félix Tum Ramírez, one of those convicted, had pointed her out to soldiers earlier in the day in the plaza. 'At 9 at night they came to take me (from the house) and took me to a big water tank. They pushed by head in the tank and when I was about to drown, let me out and asked me questions, but I said I didn't know anything,' Ixpatá said. Later, she was taken to a room on the local military base where she said soldiers raped her. 'I couldn't take it. My whole body hurt,' Ixtapá said. She got pregnant, aborted and wasn't able to have children. Tum Ramírez was convicted of raping two women and for signaling four women to be raped by others. The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Ixpatá has done. One of the accused, Pedro Sánchez, told the court Friday before the ruling was handed down that he was not involved. He was convicted of raping two women. 'I am innocent of what they are accusing us, I don't know any of these women,' Sánchez testified before the verdict. Simeón Enríquez Gómez, the third paramilitary, was also convicted of raping two of the women. Anthropologist Aura Cumes, who testified as a forensic expert during the trial, said women suffered differently in the war than men did. 'Sexual violence was a planned and deliberate method,' she said. 'It was effective for the army's goals insomuch as these brutal acts on women had the effect of causing mistrust, of destroying healthy relationships between women and men, of splitting the family unit and destroying the community social fabric.' Another woman testified in closed session that she had been washing clothes in the river when paramilitaries and soldiers forced her inside and told her to strip. She was raped first by paramilitaries and then by soldiers. Through an interpreter, she explained that they took her husband that day and she never saw him again. She was four months pregnant at the time. The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification established by the United Nations to investigate human rights violations during the civil war, documented 1,465 cases of rape during the conflict. In 89% of the cases, the women were Indigenous Maya, according to the report.
Yahoo
19 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
A court halted his deportation. The Trump administration deported him 28 minutes later.
The Trump administration has admitted that it improperly deported another immigrant in violation of a court order — the fourth known case in which the administration deported someone erroneously or in breach of specific legal requirements. Jordin Melgar-Salmeron, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, had been in immigration detention since 2022 while deportation proceedings against him were pending. But on May 7, shortly after a federal appeals court ordered the government to keep him in the United States, immigration authorities deported him back to his native country. Matthew Borowski, a lawyer for Melgar-Salmeron, told POLITICO that he intends to ask the court to order the government to return his client from El Salvador and to hold government officials in contempt. In court papers this week, officials blamed a 'confluence of administrative errors,' including missed emails and an inaccurate roster of passengers on the May 7 deportation flight. The Justice Department declined to comment, and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment. The deportation of Melgar-Salmeron was first reported by the Investigative Post, a nonprofit news outlet in western New York. The episode is reminiscent of three other deportations that courts have declared illegal or improper in recent months: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who was deported to El Salvador in violation of an immigration judge's order. Daniel Lozano-Camargo, a Venezuelan man who was deported to El Salvador in violation of a court-approved settlement. A Guatemalan man, identified in court by the initials O.C.G., who was deported to Mexico in what the administration now acknowledges was an error because he was not given a chance to exercise his legal right to raise fears that he would be tortured there. In each of those other three cases, judges have ordered the administration to try to bring the deportees back to the United States so that they can receive due process. The administration says it is working to return O.C.G. but has resisted the orders to return Abrego Garcia and Lozano-Camargo, claiming they are powerless because the men are in Salvadoran custody. Melgar-Salmeron, who spent years living in Virginia, had been in immigration detention since 2022 following a prison sentence for possessing an unregistered shotgun, according to court records. Though he had originally also been charged with entering the country illegally, he was allowed to plead guilty in 2021 to only the firearms charge. After his prison sentence ended, Melgar-Salmeron was detained by immigration authorities while deportation proceedings against him were ongoing. In January 2024, the Biden administration put Melgar-Salmeron's proceedings on hold amid broader litigation over immigration policy. But in April, the Trump administration moved to lift that hold, court documents show. Melgar-Salmeron had a longstanding appeal pending at the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. The administration asked the court to 'expedite' the appeal and indicated that it wanted to deport him by May 9 'at the latest' — but told the court it would not act before May 8. On the morning of May 7, a three-judge panel of the court ordered the government to keep Melgar-Salmeron in the United States while he pursued claims about fear of torture in his home country. Despite the court's order, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at a staging facility in Louisiana loaded Melgar-Salmeron onto a plane and deported him to El Salvador. The flight departed at 10:20 a.m. — 28 minutes after the court's order. Melgar-Salmeron is now in a Salvadoran prison, Borowski says. When the court learned about the deportation, it sent pointed questions to the administration about what had happened. The court demanded sworn declarations from ICE officials responsible for the man's deportation and an explanation of why the court's order to block his deportation was apparently not conveyed to the people who put him on the flight to El Salvador. The judges noted that the administration had assured them that Melgar-Salmeron would not be deported until at least May 8. They demanded to know why his deportation was abruptly advanced to May 7 less than an hour after their order. In a letter to the court on Wednesday, the administration acknowledged that the deportation was erroneous. Kitty Lees, a Justice Department attorney, said there had been a breakdown at multiple levels of the process. 'Several inadvertent administrative oversights led to Petitioner's May 7, 2025 removal,' Lees wrote, 'despite the express assurance made by the Government to this Court that it would forbear removing Petitioner until May 8, 2025.' Among the errors: ICE Air Operations, which arranges deportation flights, had always planned to deport Melgar-Salmeron on May 7, when it had a long-scheduled deportation flight on the books. He was listed on the manifest for that May 7 flight weeks in advance. But the Buffalo-based ICE office responsible for Melgar-Salmeron's case wrote a different date — May 9 — into his official file, a date that was relayed to the Justice Department and the court. On May 6 and May 7, ICE Air emailed a flight manifest that included Melgar-Salmeron to the Buffalo office responsible for his case. The spreadsheet was automatically forwarded to four Buffalo officers, but not the one assigned to Melgar-Salmeron's case, who didn't see it until the flight had departed. 'Due to an oversight, and because of the volume of emails received pertaining to removal flights, the … Buffalo officers who received the emails did not forward them to Petitioner's assigned … Buffalo officer,' Lees wrote. 'For an unknown reason,' when ICE was boarding people onto the flight, Melgar-Salmeron did not appear and was stricken from the manifest as a 'no-show,' Lees added. During a second sweep of the facility, they located him and 'escorted him onto the airplane,' but the manifest was never updated to reflect that he had been found. The haphazard circumstances around Melgar-Salmeron's case bear some of the same hallmarks of other high-profile deportations that judges have sought to reverse. In March, the administration deported Abrego Garcia to El Salvador despite a 2019 immigration court order that barred the government from sending him there because he could be at risk of violence at the hands of a local gang. A Justice Department lawyer acknowledged in court that the deportation had been improper, and a federal judge ordered the administration to facilitate his release from El Salvador's custody. The Supreme Court largely upheld that requirement and noted that the deportation had been 'illegal.' A different federal judge has also ordered the administration to facilitate the return of Lozano-Camargo, who was deported to El Salvador in violation of a court-approved settlement agreement that protected certain immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors. (He is referred to in court papers with a pseudonym, but POLITICO previously identified him as Lozano-Camargo.) Abrego Garcia and Lozano-Camargo remain in Salvadoran prisons. The Trump administration has claimed in court that it has no ability to force the Salvadoran government to return them to United States custody. The administration, however, says it has taken steps to arrange a flight to bring back O.C.G., the Guatemalan man who was deported to Mexico in February. The man claims he was raped and otherwise targeted for being gay during a previous stay in Mexico. Administration officials initially claimed in court that he was given a chance to raise fears about being sent back to Mexico, but they later retracted that assertion and admitted they have no evidence that he was ever asked about whether he feared violence there. A federal judge ruled that O.C.G. had been deported without proper due process and ordered the government to facilitate his return.
Toronto Star
19 hours ago
- Toronto Star
Guatemala court convicts 3 ex-paramilitaries of war crimes for rape and gives them 40-year sentences
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — More than four decades after Guatemalan soldiers and paramilitaries raped Indigenous women during their efforts to crush an insurgency in the country's 36-year civil war, a court on Friday convicted three men of crimes against humanity in the case and sentenced them to 40 years in prison. Thirty-six women from the Maya Achi Indigenous group came forward in 2011 to seek justice for the abuses they suffered between 1981 and 1985. They came from Rabinal, a small town about 55 miles (88 kms) north of the capital.
Yahoo
19 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
Guatemala court convicts 3 ex-paramilitaries of war crimes for rape and gives them 40-year sentences
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — More than four decades after Guatemalan soldiers and paramilitaries raped Indigenous women during their efforts to crush an insurgency in the country's 36-year civil war, a court on Friday convicted three men of crimes against humanity in the case and sentenced them to 40 years in prison. Thirty-six women from the Maya Achi Indigenous group came forward in 2011 to seek justice for the abuses they suffered between 1981 and 1985. They came from Rabinal, a small town about 55 miles (88 kms) north of the capital. Six of them testified against the three men convicted Friday. As the all female three judge panel prepared to announce the verdict, several elderly women huddled around a young woman who translated the judges' words from Spanish to Achi. Judge María Eugenia Castellanos, president of the tribunal, said the women had been brave to come on repeated occasions to testify. 'They are crimes of solitude that stigmatize the woman. It is not easy to speak of them,' she said. Judge Marling Mayela González Arrivillaga said there was no doubt about the women's testimony. In 2022, five other paramilitaries – men from the area trained by soldiers to help root out insurgents – were convicted of raping women and sentenced to 30 years in prison. No soldiers have been tried for the acts. Guatemala's civil war pitted the army and police against leftist rebels. It ended with the signing of peace accords in 1996. Of the 36 women who originally came forward, seven have died. The youngest was 19 when she was attacked. Among the women who testified at this trial, was Pedrina Ixpatá. She is 63 now, but was 21 when she said she was assaulted. Félix Tum Ramírez, one of those convicted, had pointed her out to soldiers earlier in the day in the plaza. 'At 9 at night they came to take me (from the house) and took me to a big water tank. They pushed by head in the tank and when I was about to drown, let me out and asked me questions, but I said I didn't know anything,' Ixpatá said. Later, she was taken to a room on the local military base where she said soldiers raped her. 'I couldn't take it. My whole body hurt,' Ixtapá said. She got pregnant, aborted and wasn't able to have children. Tum Ramírez was convicted of raping two women and for signaling four women to be raped by others. The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Ixpatá has done. One of the accused, Pedro Sánchez, told the court Friday before the ruling was handed down that he was not involved. He was convicted of raping two women. 'I am innocent of what they are accusing us, I don't know any of these women,' Sánchez testified before the verdict. Simeón Enríquez Gómez, the third paramilitary, was also convicted of raping two of the women. Anthropologist Aura Cumes, who testified as a forensic expert during the trial, said women suffered differently in the war than men did. 'Sexual violence was a planned and deliberate method,' she said. 'It was effective for the army's goals insomuch as these brutal acts on women had the effect of causing mistrust, of destroying healthy relationships between women and men, of splitting the family unit and destroying the community social fabric.' Another woman testified in closed session that she had been washing clothes in the river when paramilitaries and soldiers forced her inside and told her to strip. She was raped first by paramilitaries and then by soldiers. Through an interpreter, she explained that they took her husband that day and she never saw him again. She was four months pregnant at the time. The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification established by the United Nations to investigate human rights violations during the civil war, documented 1,465 cases of rape during the conflict. In 89% of the cases, the women were Indigenous Maya, according to the report.
Winnipeg Free Press
19 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Guatemala court convicts 3 ex-paramilitaries of war crimes for rape and gives them 40-year sentences
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — More than four decades after Guatemalan soldiers and paramilitaries raped Indigenous women during their efforts to crush an insurgency in the country's 36-year civil war, a court on Friday convicted three men of crimes against humanity for their actions and sentenced them to 40 years in prison. Thirty-six women from the Maya Achi Indigenous group came forward in 2011 to seek justice for the abuses they suffered between 1981 and 1985. They came from Rabinal, a small town about 55 miles (88 kms) north of the capital. Six of them testified against the three men convicted Friday. Judge María Eugenia Castellanos, president of the panel, said the women had been brave to come on repeated occasions to testify. 'They are crimes of solitude that stigmatize the woman. It is not easy to speak of them,' she said. Judge Marling Mayela González Arrivillaga said there was no doubt about the women's testimony. In 2022, five other paramilitaries – men from the area trained by soldiers to help root out insurgents – were convicted of raping women and sentenced to 30 years in prison. No soldiers have been tried for the acts. Guatemala's civil war pitted the army and police against leftist rebels. It ended with the signing of peace accords in 1996.
